Bonus Episode: Learning from the Torah to Reject Victim Culture - with Mark Gerson

Speaker 1 You are listening to an art media podcast.

Speaker 2 The Torah and modern social science as well have identified three kinds of culture: one is the victim culture, one is the honor culture, and one is the dignity culture.

Speaker 2 And the honor culture and the victim culture both say a very similar thing. They said, if you get offended, it should be consequential.

Speaker 2 The only question is whether you fight, that's an honor culture, or whether you complain, that's a victim culture.

Speaker 2 And the alternative posited by the Bible is the dignity culture, which says, don't worry if someone offends you, because if it doesn't affect your mission or your purpose, you have to keep going until you achieve it.

Speaker 1 It's 6 p.m. on Saturday, November 1st here in New York City.
It's 1 a.m. on Sunday, November 2nd in Israel, where Israelis are beginning a new week.

Speaker 1 In recent days, for those of you following intra-right politics here in the U.S., there have been some shocking statements on Israel, on the American Jewish community, and the future of MAGA and the conservative movement.

Speaker 1 There's a lot to unpack here, and it's something I have been understandably following closely.

Speaker 1 And it's something we'll be getting into in upcoming episodes, including the episode we're dropping on Monday. So please look out for that.
Now on to today's news.

Speaker 1 On Thursday of last week, deceased hostages Amiram Cooper, founder of Kibbutz Niroz, and Sakhar Baruch, an engineering student, were returned to Israel by Hamas.

Speaker 1 On Friday night, Hamas handed three caskets to the Red Cross that acclaimed contained the remains of fallen hostages.

Speaker 1 However, Israeli officials concluded that the remains did not belong to any hostages, a stunt that Hamas has pulled multiple times before. As of now, 11 deceased hostages remain in Gaza.

Speaker 1 On Thursday, roughly 200,000 ultra-Orthodox Jewish men blocked the entrance to Jerusalem in protest against IDF conscription.

Speaker 1 Some disturbing scenes came out of the protest, with some protesters attacking journalists and clashing with police.

Speaker 1 Earlier this week, the IDF launched a criminal investigation into the top IDF legal officer, General Yifat Tomery Rushomi, over the accusation that she had approved the leaking leaking of surveillance footage from the Ste Tayman detention facility last year, which showed IDF soldiers abusing a Palestinian detainee.

Speaker 1 On Friday morning, she admitted that she had, in fact, approved the leak and handed her resignation to IDF Chief of Staff A.L. Zamir.

Speaker 1 In other news, Iran's foreign minister told Al Jazeera that the Islamic Republic will not halt uranium enrichment or its missile program and that Tehran is not open to direct talks with the U.S.

Speaker 1 He told the the reporter, quote, Tehran is prepared for all possibilities and expects any aggressive behavior from Israel, close quote. Now on to today's episode.
Our guest is Mark Gerson.

Speaker 1 He is the chairman of United Hatzalah, one of the most innovative medical emergency response organizations, not only in Israel, but in the world.

Speaker 1 He's also the chairman of the African Mission Healthcare Foundation. Mark is a very successful, long-time investor.

Speaker 1 He's co-founded numerous startups, some of which have turned into pretty large companies. So successful entrepreneur.

Speaker 1 He's also the author of various books, including his most recent book titled God Was Right, How Modern Social Science Proves the Torah is True. Now, Mark is not a formally trained Jewish educator.

Speaker 1 He is completely self-taught. And he's now, this is his second book on Jewish ideas and the Jewish people.

Speaker 1 His first book was on the Passover, on on the Passover Seder, on the Haggadah, which I highly recommend. And I still use that book every year during Passover since he published it.

Speaker 1 And this book takes his Jewish studies and his Jewish writings to another level. Mark Gerson on God was right.
This is Call Me Back.

Speaker 1 And I'm pleased to welcome to a special edition of Call Me Back, one of the most creative entrepreneurs and philanthropists that I know and a prolific writer, Mark Gerson, who recently published, I have the book right here, God Was Right, How Modern Social Science Proves the Torah is True, which we'll link to in the show notes.

Speaker 1 Mark, thanks for being here.

Speaker 2 Dan, it is so great to be here with you.

Speaker 1 Mark, I said you're a prolific writer. So you've written this book, The God Was Right.
You wrote a book for Passover that I actually still use.

Speaker 1 You wrote it, I think it was published during the pandemic, The Telling, which I still use during Seders.

Speaker 1 But most people who know you think those are the only two books you've written or edited. But the reality is your publishing career predated those two works.

Speaker 2 Yes, I had written a couple books in the 1990s. I actually made my senior thesis in college, which was on the history of American neoconservative thought, into a book.

Speaker 2 And then I did a memoir of teaching high school in Jersey City.

Speaker 2 That was in the 90s. And my first book in the 21st century was The Telling, how Judaism's essential book reveals the meaning of life.

Speaker 2 And Dan, that's the book on the Haggadah, which I'm so honored to hear that you still use at your Seders.

Speaker 1 Oh, I'm a believer. I recommend it to people all the time.
Okay, so Mark, I want to talk about this book.

Speaker 1 And I guess my first question for you is, if your book was in a bookstore, what section would it be in?

Speaker 2 It would be in the self-help section.

Speaker 1 Okay, so that's interesting. So not in the Judaica section.

Speaker 2 Well, it could be there, but the Bible itself should be in the self-help section, as should every book about the Bible or about the Torah, because we have to first ask about the Torah, as we do about any book, is what is the genre of the book?

Speaker 2 And the genre of the Torah, it's not a history book, it's not a science book, it's not a cookbook, it's a guidebook or a self-help book. Because what the Torah does is it gives us very practical.

Speaker 2 always applicable, continually relevant guidance on basically all of the questions, all of the opportunities, and all of the challenges that we have today. So how would we describe such a book?

Speaker 2 We would say, well, that's a self-help book, which is exactly what the Torah is.

Speaker 1 Okay, so let's talk practically. First of all, you focus a lot on social science in the book, and you basically say both well-researched and well-grounded and peer-reviewed social science,

Speaker 1 as well as like kind of faddish social science, whatever it is. You basically argue all the social science we take as gospel can actually, no pun intended, can actually be found in the Torah.

Speaker 2 Just explain that. Yeah, of course.
So the Torah issues guidance on all kinds of subjects that are of continuing relevance and are totally applicable to everything we deal with every day.

Speaker 2 And for thousands of years, people have asked the question, is the Torah true? And up until the 21st century, people only had two things to assess that by, which were faith and experience.

Speaker 2 In comes the 21st century, an entirely new tool emerges, and that is modern social science.

Speaker 2 Because modern social scientists, often, or perhaps almost always, without knowing it, are asking and answering the same questions that the Torah asks and answers.

Speaker 2 So what I thought to do in God was right was to take claims that the Torah makes on subjects that are interesting, relevant, and applicable to everyone, dating, clothing, diversity, parenting, everything, and match it up against the social science, which has asked the very same questions and come up in an entirely different way with a set of answers.

Speaker 2 And what I discovered is that all of the Torah's claims on all of these subjects have now been validated by modern social science.

Speaker 1 Okay, so I want to go through some of these self-health principles, these guiding principles in the Torah. So why don't you just pick two or three of your favorite examples?

Speaker 2 Sure. So a question that everyone has asked at one time or another, which is, how do I know that he or she is the one?

Speaker 2 In other words, how do I know that I should marry him or her or how should I go about finding my spouse? And the Torah anticipates that question and provides a very direct answer.

Speaker 2 And this is in the story of right in Genesis. So what happens in the story is Sarah dies and Abraham says, it's time to find a wife for my son Isaac.

Speaker 2 So he dispatches his servant Eleazar to go find a wife for Isaac. And he says to Eleazar, go to Haran.
So why Haran? Because Haran was the place where earlier in Genesis, Abraham had made souls.

Speaker 2 So whatever that means, we know that Haran is a place where people have good character and can have their souls made to Abraham's liking.

Speaker 2 So Eleazar accepts his mission and he goes to Haran and he meets a woman. That woman will be Rebecca.
And he notices only two things about the woman.

Speaker 2 One, the text tells us she is, quote, very fair to look upon. Two, she brings water for Eleazar and all of his camels.
She is exceptionally generous.

Speaker 2 So on the basis of those two and only two characteristics, Eleazar says effectively, you are the woman for my man Isaac.

Speaker 2 And then Rebecca is given the choice herself, should I go with this man Eleazar to marry Isaac? And Rebecca knows only two things about Isaac.

Speaker 2 She knows that he's wealthy, so he's going to be a good provider, and she knows that he loves God.

Speaker 2 So on the basis of those two and only two characteristics, Rebecca says, I will go with you to marry Isaac.

Speaker 2 Fast forward a little bit to Genesis 24, 67, which is the story of what happens when Isaac and Rebecca actually meet.

Speaker 2 The text tells us, and the order of things in the Bible is usually very important, and it's particularly important here. The text tells us about Isaac and Rebecca.

Speaker 2 He married her, she became his spouse, and he loved her. So what's the Bible telling us about how to find our spouse and to live a long and happy marriage?

Speaker 2 It's telling us, look for a spouse in a good place. Then identify two, maybe three characteristics in the potential spouse.
that optimizes for what will constitute a good marriage.

Speaker 2 Once you've identified those two or three characteristics, and it won't take long, it didn't take Isaac and Rebecca long, it won't take long, just get married.

Speaker 2 Don't think too much about it, just get married. And then the text tells us he married her, she became his wife.
So getting married and becoming a wife or a husband must be two different things.

Speaker 2 So the Bible is telling us, identify the two or three characteristics, get married, then become a spouse. What does that mean? Well, we're talking about the biblical Rebecca.

Speaker 2 So it means conduct iterate acts of giving. That's what it means to really be a spouse.
And then love will follow.

Speaker 1 So make the commitment and then you'll fall in love with the commitment you made rather than the other way around.

Speaker 2 Exactly. What the Torah is telling us is that commitment follows love.
It does not precede love. And we have this term in our culture, falling in love.

Speaker 2 And the biblical author, I'm sure, would say, this is ridiculous. Love is not something you can fall into.
You can fall on your face. You can fall into a pool.
You can't fall into love.

Speaker 2 Love is something that you cultivate through iterate acts of giving with someone that you share two or three essential characteristics. And the love that is ever deepening will follow.

Speaker 2 And how do we know it's ever deepening? Because Isaac and Rebecca enjoy the happiest marriage in the Bible.

Speaker 1 There's a lot of social science about what the online dating culture, what dating apps

Speaker 1 have done to the crisis of loneliness, the crisis of lack of marriage, in assessing why we're facing some kind of social crisis in American culture, Western society today.

Speaker 1 So what would the Torah say, given what you just said about the role of dating apps?

Speaker 2 So what the Torah would tell us is dating apps is probably not the way to go. And the problem with dating apps is that there are so many characteristics that people look for.
Right.

Speaker 2 And it's so easy to swipe one way or the other way and to keep going. But Dan, you're exactly right about this genuine crisis of existential loneliness.
And the Torah anticipates that as well.

Speaker 2 The Torah uses the expression not good in describing something as not good only twice. It does so with God to Adam when God says it is not good for man to be alone.

Speaker 2 And it does so with Jethro, Moses' beloved father-in-law to Moses when Jethro sees Moses leading alone and says, what you are doing is not good.

Speaker 2 So the only two times that we see something being described as not good is being alone.

Speaker 2 And then the question is, well, how should one alleviate the loneliness that comes from being alone? And again, the Torah's right there with an answer. So God sees that Adam is lonely.

Speaker 2 God says, it is not good for man to be alone. So God has lots of choices.
He could have made Adam a friend. He could have made Adam a golfing buddy, but he doesn't.

Speaker 2 He makes Adam a wife, and he describes that wife as a help against yourself. God is telling us that the quintessential relationship, the indispensable relationship, is that between spouses.

Speaker 2 We've seen this shows up time and time again in the data. People who are married are much happier than people who are unmarried.

Speaker 2 People who are married live much longer than than people who are unmarried.

Speaker 1 Okay, another term you talk about in the book, which the Torah talks a lot about in its self-help book, is expressing, you know, real hope that people seriously consider what a dignity culture, quote unquote, a dignity culture.

Speaker 1 So what's a dignity culture?

Speaker 2 Well, so the Torah and modern social science as well have identified three kinds of culture. One is the victim culture, one is the honor culture, and one is the dignity culture.

Speaker 2 Let's start with the victim culture. So the Torah tells us, and this comes through in the Passover Seder experience, it tells us you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

Speaker 2 Now, if someone said to me or to you, Dan, you were strangers in the land of Egypt, we'd probably say, wait, wait, we were slaves.

Speaker 2 Like the stranger is the guy sitting next to me in the bus who I don't know, but that really doesn't describe our experience in Egypt. We were slaves.

Speaker 2 And then we can hear the voice of God saying, I know you were slaves. I liberated you from slavery.
In fact, I define myself as the one who liberated you from slavery.

Speaker 2 So I know you were slaves, but I am asking you to define yourselves not as slaves, but as strangers, so that you don't see yourselves as slaves, so that you never see yourself as a victim.

Speaker 2 And we see this motif throughout the Torah, for instance, when God and Moses instruct us about disputes, when it says, you shall not favor the poor or the rich.

Speaker 2 You shouldn't favor the rich because they might do something for you afterwards, and you shouldn't favor the poor because of sympathy.

Speaker 2 You shall judge every case by its merits and every person by his character. So the the Bible doesn't like the victim culture.
The Bible also doesn't like the honor culture.

Speaker 2 So what is the honor culture? What the honor culture says is that if you're offended, you fight. So what the victim culture says, if you're offended, you complain.

Speaker 2 The honor culture says, if you're offended, you fight. And the classic honor culture is the pre-Civil War American South.

Speaker 2 And we see this in advertisements in the newspaper where one man would take out an advertisement directed at another saying, I heard that you called me a puppy. Therefore, we must have a duel.

Speaker 2 So So the honor culture says, if you're offended, you fight. Now, how do we know the Bible doesn't like this?

Speaker 2 Because in mid-Genesis, we read about how Abraham's nephew Lot has made all of his money and a lot of it from his association and affiliation with Abraham.

Speaker 2 But strife develops between Abraham and Lot and between their respective herdsmen. Now, if the book of Genesis were the godfather for, Abraham would off his nephew.

Speaker 2 But the book of Genesis is not the godfather. So what does Abraham do? Abraham says to Lot, we need to separate, but you pick where you want to go and I'll go in the other direction.

Speaker 2 So Abraham rejects the honor culture, which says that if you're offended, you have to fight. Moses rejects the honor culture.

Speaker 2 Moses and Abraham both know how to use violence, but they use it infrequently and they use it strategically and it's never personal. So why is it never personal?

Speaker 2 Because Abraham and Moses exemplify the opposite of the honor culture and the victim culture, which is the dignity culture.

Speaker 2 And what the dignity culture asserts is that an individual should be unconcerned about himself and maximally concerned about his mission and his purpose, which everybody has.

Speaker 2 So Abraham and Moses model how if someone offends you or says something untowards towards you, if it doesn't affect your mission or your purpose, ignore it.

Speaker 2 Don't get distracted by what someone says, by what someone does. A person of dignity who's living in a dignified culture stays focused on his mission and his purpose and he will never be deterred.

Speaker 2 We see these three cultural examples in our day as well. As we discussed, the quintessential honor culture is the pre-Civil War American South, and it's persistent.

Speaker 2 There's a really interesting social science study from the late 1990s at the University of Michigan, where the social scientists recruited a cohort of undergrads, a cohort of white male undergrads from the North and a cohort of white male undergrads from the South.

Speaker 2 And they told the undergrads, okay, walk down the hall and you'll participate in the science experiment at the end and as they were walking confederate of the experimenters so someone who's in on the experiment hit each of the young men and said hey asshole and then when they got to the end of the hall they go into the classroom and there was no psychological experiment there was a saliva test and they wanted to measure the level of cortisol which shows anxiety and anger in all the young men.

Speaker 2 And it turns out that the young men from the south had very high cortisol levels. Being called an asshole really angered them, where the young men from the north that barely registered.

Speaker 2 So cultures die hard. Cultures persist.
And these three kinds of cultures are still very much with us in the United States, to a greater or lesser extent, and around the world.

Speaker 2 And these are the honor culture and the victim culture. And the honor culture and the victim culture both say a very similar thing.
They appear different, but they say a similar thing.

Speaker 2 They said, if you get offended, it should be consequential. The only question is whether you fight, that's an honor culture, or whether you complain, that's a victim culture.

Speaker 2 And the alternative posited by the Bible is the dignity culture, which says, don't worry if someone offends you, because if it doesn't affect your mission or your purpose, you have to keep going until you achieve it.

Speaker 1 Another topic that I think will be surprising to listeners. What does the Torah say about the importance of the idea of call it dress for success?

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah, what a great question, because that's exactly what the Torah says, dress for success. And the Torah has a lot to say about clothing.

Speaker 2 Now, one might think that the Bible wouldn't have a lot to say about clothing. One might think that the Bible would say, it matters what's on the inside, not what's on the outside.

Speaker 2 Well, that's not what the Bible says. So we can return to the story of Isaac and Rebecca.
This is many years after they got married. And at this point, they're old.

Speaker 2 Isaac is blind, and he thinks he's about to die. And he's on his deathbed, or what he thinks is his deathbed.
And Isaac and Rebecca at that point have twin boys who are probably in their 20s.

Speaker 2 And there's a problem. And the problem is that each of them has a favorite son.
Rebecca's favorite son is Jacob, who we learned before dwelt in tents, which means he was a studious sort.

Speaker 2 He didn't engage much with the world, but he was studying in tents. And Esau was a man of the fields, and Esau was a trickster type.
But there's a problem.

Speaker 2 Isaac has the impromptu of Jewish leadership, the birthright that he's going to give to one of the boys. And he's going to give it to Esau because that's his favorite son.

Speaker 2 If he gives it to Esau, Dan, you and I are not here. The Jewish story would have stopped before it got started.

Speaker 2 So Rebecca, who is a genius, has about 20 minutes to save the Jewish experience before it gets started. She has a challenge.

Speaker 2 She needs to get Jacob to trick his blind father, Isaac, into thinking that he, Jacob, is Esau so that Isaac gives him the blessing of the birthright rather than Esau.

Speaker 2 So how is Rebecca going to get Jacob, who has never tricked anybody, How is she in about 20 minutes going to enable Jacob to become a trickster and to pull off the greatest trick of all time and to get the impromature of Jewish leadership from Isaac.

Speaker 2 She tells Jacob something very interesting. She says, put on Esau's best clothes.
So why would she say that? What does it matter what Jacob is wearing? Isaac can't see anything.

Speaker 2 But Rebekah had an insight. Rebecca knew that if Jacob put on Esau's best clothes, he would feel like Esau.
And if he felt like Esau, he could act like Esau and he could pull off a trick.

Speaker 2 And indeed, he does.

Speaker 2 And then we can fast forward a little bit to the book of Leviticus, which tells us what the high priest has to wear on yom kippur and it's so specific it tells us what kind of underwear the high priest has to wear on yom kippur leading us to ask what does it matter what kind of underwear the high priest has to wear on yom kippur the only people are going to see his underwear are the high priest and maybe mrs high priest but nobody else so what does it matter well it matters because the bible is telling us is that Clothing is not for external purposes.

Speaker 2 Clothing is for internal purposes. What the Bible is telling us is that the high priest has to wear special underwear on Yom Kippur so that he feels special on Yom Kippur.

Speaker 2 And if he feels special on Yom Kippur, he'll act special. So let's fast forward to modern social science and we can ask, is it true? Is clothing actually that important?

Speaker 2 And let's go to the 1979, 1980 Pittsburgh sports season.

Speaker 1 Big, big year for Pittsburgh.

Speaker 2 Big year for Pittsburgh, exactly. The Steelers win the Super Bowl and the Pirates win the World Series.

Speaker 2 The problem, the Penguins aren't any good.

Speaker 1 For our listeners, for those who don't follow sports, the Steelers are the football team, the Pirates are the baseball team, but the Penguins are the hockey team.

Speaker 1 And the Penguins, two out of three is pretty impressive, but the Penguins don't perform, so they're left out.

Speaker 2 And they got high expectations among Pittsburgh Sports fans. Right.
So it's January. The season is well underway, and they're not doing very well.

Speaker 2 So if you can change one thing mid-season, what do you do? Well, you can't make enough trades to change your fortunes that dramatically in the middle of the season, but you can change your uniforms.

Speaker 2 And that's what they did. They changed their uniforms from light uniforms to black and gold.
It turns out their fortune did change, not in the win and loss category, but in the penalty category.

Speaker 2 They ended up leading the league in penalties. And then subsequent studies showed that teams that wear dark uniforms in both hockey and football register many more penalties than teams that don't.

Speaker 2 Okay, so is this significant? Well, let's go to 2012, Northwestern.

Speaker 2 So Northwestern psychologists have an experiment where they take one cohort of students and they say, you wear this white coat and that coat's a painter's coat.

Speaker 2 They take a second cohort of students and say, you wear this white coat and that coat's a doctor's coat. And then each cohort of students is given an attention-seeking task.

Speaker 2 And the students who are wearing the white coat thinking it's a doctor's coat do much better.

Speaker 2 Two years later, Yale runs a similar experiment with young people undergrads participating in a negotiation workshop.

Speaker 2 Some are told to come dressed as you are, others are told and come dressed for work, suit and tie. and its female equivalent.
Those who are told to dress formally end up doing vastly better.

Speaker 2 So what we see is that the biblical Rebecca was right, that what we wear actually significantly influences how we act. So why would this be so?

Speaker 2 Well, in the last five to 10 years, a new discipline has emerged in universities around the world and it's called fashion psychology.

Speaker 2 And fashion psychology is the study of how what we wear influences how we feel and how we feel influences how we act.

Speaker 2 And this has profound implications for all of us because one decision that each of us is going to make every day is what should I wear in the morning?

Speaker 2 And there's a very interesting series of studies from psychologists which ask the question let's say someone wakes up and they're depressed what will they likely wear well someone wakes up and they're depressed or very sad they're likely to put on probably a pair of sweatpants and a baggy sweatshirt thus exacerbating that their depression instead what psychologists have found is that a woman who's depressed will ignore about 90 percent of her wardrobe within which the solution might lie.

Speaker 2 So what should a woman who's depressed wear? There's a whole regimen given by fashion psychologists that's proven to be very helpful. It says, wear colors that evoke nature.

Speaker 2 Put on a leather jacket over a skirt to trigger the brain sense of novelty. Put on mismatched jewelry.
There's a whole bunch of things in a woman's wardrobe, in her drawers, that she can put on.

Speaker 2 And of course, there are male equivalents to, that can actually change the way we feel and alleviate sadness or even depression.

Speaker 2 And I think the last word on fashion psychology goes to the NFL running back Deion Sanders. What Deion Sanders said, if you dress good, you feel good.
If you feel good, you play good.

Speaker 2 If you play good, they pay good.

Speaker 2 The biblical Rebecca could not have said it better.

Speaker 1 So, Mark, staying on the issue of sports, you talk in the book about how sports is one of the few cultures where participants take ultimate responsibility.

Speaker 2 Can you talk about that? Yeah, so the Bible insists on the principle of 100% responsibility. And Dan, we can go back and say, why are we called Jews? Well, we're named Jews after Judah.

Speaker 2 And Judah is distinguished because in the great biblical story of Judah and Tamar, Tamar is Judah's sister-in-law, not realizing she's his sister-in-law, but thinking she's a temple prostitute, Judah has sex with her.

Speaker 2 And later on in the story, Judah is given the option, do I confess that it was me who had sex with Tamar, or I can easily get out of it?

Speaker 2 And Judah takes responsibility and says, she is more righteous than me. And in that taking of responsibility, he becomes great and we become Jews.
So why is taking responsibility such a big deal?

Speaker 2 Well, what we see in modern society is that it's really hard. And we see this embodied in this famous or infamous expression, mistakes were made.

Speaker 2 So when someone says mistakes were made, it's like, yeah, of course a bad thing happened, but I'm not taking responsibility for it. But there is one subculture or one culture.

Speaker 2 in American life where taking responsibility is standard, and that is professional sports. So athletes and coaches almost always take responsibility.

Speaker 2 And there's example after example of professional sports people taking responsibility in ways that people outside of the game wouldn't.

Speaker 2 And one of the examples that I love, and I quote, is the great UConn coach, Jim Calhoun. And there was a player who was a superstar in Connecticut in high school.
He didn't go to UConn.

Speaker 2 He went to some other college. And Jim Calhoun was asked in a press conference, well, why didn't you successfully recruit him? And Jim Calhoun says, because I fucked up.
Simple as that.

Speaker 2 Took responsibility. Next question.
And we see that time time and time again with athletes and coaches.

Speaker 2 And why are sports people, why are athletes and coaches unique as a culture in taking responsibility? I think because in the world of sports, it's all about wins and losses and it's recorded that day.

Speaker 2 So if you want to win, athletes have realized you have to take responsibility. And there's no hiding winning and losing in sports like there might be in other sectors of society.

Speaker 2 There's nobody else to blame. Did you win? Did you lose? And so when you look at the world that way, as athletes and coaches do, did we win or did we lose that day? It's pretty obvious.

Speaker 2 It's pretty binary. How do you win? You take responsibility.

Speaker 2 And this is something that the biblical Judah knew and was so important to the author of the Torah that we are known as Jews because of the biblical Judah who distinguishes himself by taking responsibility.

Speaker 1 I'm not only a big sports fan, but I'm a student of post-game press conferences because it no, it gets to right what you're saying.

Speaker 1 You rarely have at these post-game press conferences players or coaches pointing the finger at other people. Rarely.
There are exceptions. I'm looking at you, Aaron Rodgers.

Speaker 1 But generally speaking, they take on the responsibility.

Speaker 1 Some of the best ones at that, like Andrew Luck, who no longer plays in the NFL, but his post-game press conferences were extraordinary because any success the team had, he credited with his teammates.

Speaker 1 Any failure the team had, he blamed himself.

Speaker 1 He was also famous for when he would get tackled by the opposing team, when he would get sacked by the opposing team, he would congratulate the players on the opposing team for the quality, the technique of the sack, like him getting taken down.

Speaker 1 Wow.

Speaker 2 Well, you know, one of his teammates, Anthony Gonzalez, who played for the Colts and then he served in Congress, Anthony told me that he'd come back from the sideline as a young wide receiver and he would tell the coach, the safety held me.

Speaker 2 And the coach would say, why'd you let him get so close? Classic sports taking responsibility. Right.
If you ran faster, he'd be nowhere near you. So take responsibility for not running fast enough.

Speaker 2 Don't blame the red.

Speaker 2 Right, right, right, right.

Speaker 1 All right. Last question.
How did this book inform your understanding of present-day Israel, the region,

Speaker 1 the seemingly endless set of crises that Israel has been going through and some versions of which it will be going through.

Speaker 2 So Israel is absolutely indispensable in the world of the Torah.

Speaker 2 In fact, perhaps the greatest commandment in the Torah is when God tells us that we are to become a kingdom of priests and a holy nation. You can't do that virtually.

Speaker 2 You have to do that in a place, and the Torah tells us where that place is. That place is in the land of Israel.

Speaker 2 So in order to be a kingdom of priests and a holy nation, we need a safe, secure, and prosperous Israel.

Speaker 2 And then we can create, as Israelis have, that kingdom of priests and a holy nation that can be a model onto the world, which is the divine vision.

Speaker 2 We see time and time again throughout the Torah references to the land as being indispensable to the Jewish experience. Taking Zionism out of Judaism is like ripping a heart out of its body.

Speaker 2 The thing cannot survive.

Speaker 1 Beautiful. Mark, thank you.
You are a friend, a teacher. This is an extraordinary contribution.
We're going to link to the book in the show notes. People should buy it.

Speaker 1 It's the kind of book that you hopefully will return to and kind of dip in and out throughout life. And so, Mark, thank you for the book and thank you for this conversation.

Speaker 2 Dan, thank you so much. I am so honored to be on with you today.

Speaker 2 And I just want to say that in thousands of years from now, when people consider this moment in Jewish history, Call Me Back will be a primary source for which students and seekers of all time try to understand this crucial period in Jewish history.

Speaker 2 And so, Dan, thank you for being its chronicler and for delivering us such consistently interesting and instructive teachings from Call Me Back. So such an honor to be here with you today.

Speaker 1 Thank you, Mark. I appreciate that.
And I'm glad we did this.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 1 Talk soon.

Speaker 1 That's our show for today. If you value the Call Me Back podcast and you want to support our mission, please subscribe to our weekly members-only show, Inside Call Me Back.

Speaker 1 Inside Call Me Back is where Nadavayal, Amit Segel, and I respond to challenging questions from listeners and have the conversations that typically occur after the cameras stop rolling.

Speaker 1 To subscribe, please follow the link in the show notes or you can go to arcmedia.org. That's arkmedia.org.
Call Me Back is produced and edited by Elon Benatar.

Speaker 1 Arc Media's executive producer is Adam James Levin Areti. Sound and video editing by Martin Huergo and Mariana Liz Burgos.
Our director of operations, Maya Rockoff. Research by Gabe Silverstein.

Speaker 1 Our music was composed by Yuval Semo. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.